Nocilla Trilogy

A landmark in contemporary Spanish literature, Agustín Fernández Mallo's Nocilla Trilogy - made up of the novels Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Experience and Nocilla Lab - is a project for our time. Reading takes the form of literary channel surfing: we flick through an audacious network of chopped-up stories, recycled texts and mixed-media collages, and try to find the signal in the noise, reflecting the dizzying search for meaning that characterizes life in our digital age.  The globe-spanning narratives that explode across the trilogy take us from a lone poplar tree in the Nevada desert to a barnacle-covered cliff in Galicia, Spain, through scientific treatises and film-editing manuals, personal journals and comic strips. The books are full of references to indie cinema, theoretical physics, conceptual art, practical architecture, the history of computers and the decadence of the novel. And yet, for all the freewheeling, fragmentary swagger, a startling order emerges and takes hold. Peerless in its daring, Nocilla Trilogy charts a hidden and exhilarating cartography of contemporary experience. 

Agustín Fernández Mallo was born in La Coruña in 1967, and is a qualified physicist. In 2000 he formulated a self-termed theory of 'post-poetry' which explores connections between art and science. His Nocilla Trilogy, published between 2006 and 2009, brought about an important shift in contemporary Spanish writing and paved the way for the birth of a new generation of authors, known as the 'Nocilla Generation'. His essay Postpoesía: hacia un nuevo paradigma was shortlisted for the Anagrama Essay Prize in 2009. In 2018 his long essay Teoría general de la basura (cultura, apropiación, complejidad) was published by Galaxia Gutenberg, and in the same year his latest novel, The Things We've Seen, won the Biblioteca Breve Prize.